Media Education (Mediaobrazovanie), 2019, 59(2) Copyright © 2019 by Academic Publishing House Researcher s.r.o. Published in the Slovak Republic Media Education (Mediaobrazovanie) Has been issued since 2005 ISSN 1994-4160 E-ISSN 1994-4195 2019, 59(2): 243-248 DOI: 10.13187/me.2019.2.243 www.ejournal53.com The Heritage of Yuri Lotman, Umberto Eco and Vladimir Propp in the Context of Media Literacy Education Alexander Fedorov a , * a Rostov State University of Economics, Russian Federation Abstract The material for this article was the works of V. Propp, Y. Lotman and U. Eco in the context of semiotic approaches and media educational opportunities. The author of the article fully agrees with U. Eco's opinion that modern society is unthinkable without (self) media education of a person, because in the near future our society will split into two – those who do without critical selection of received information in their contacts with the media, and those who are able to select and process information. At the same time, it is necessary to teach people to choose the most important and useful things, because if they do not learn to do so, access to all this information will be completely useless. Thus, the selection and processing/reasoning/analysis of media texts is the basis of media competence in the 21st century. Studying the media and virtual world requires knowledge and skills from different fields. In this context, the scientific heritage of V. Propp, Y. Lotman and U. Eco is truly inexhaustible and fits perfectly into the main spectrum of media education tasks, both at higher and secondary schools. Keywords: Propp, Lotman, Eco, media texts, media literacy, students, school, university. 1. Introduction In the pragmatic era of the 21st century, the importance of "classical" humanitarian knowledge is diminished not only by technocrats. On the one hand, "the notion that 'serious people' involved in the exact sciences – and even more so in the creation of new techniques – may be ignorant of the structural modeling of artistic and cultural objects (Lotman, 1992: 30), since they have, as they say, another "higher" mission, remains quite stable at the technocratic level. On the other hand, the most prominent characters in the media's close attention, apart from political leaders, are usually not genius scientists and cultural figures, but criminals (of course, not ordinary thieves, but more "vivid specimens" – serial killers, sexual maniacs, pedophiles, etc.) in conjunction with glamorous representatives of the show business. The latter become "experts" in the field of ethics and culture, whose views are mass replicated by television, radio, the press and the Internet. This phenomenon in itself is not new: A.P. Chekhov described with irony in his brilliant story First Class Passenger (1886) the conversation between two outstanding, but unknown to the general public scientists – an engineer and an academician. With undisguised regret, the engineer who had recently won the first prize in a professional competition tells his vis-a-vis: "I could point out to you the many of my contemporaries, people of great talent and hard work, but who died in the unknown. All these Russian navigators, chemists, physicists, mechanics, farmers – are they * Corresponding author E-mail addresses: [email protected] (A.V. Fedorov) 243 Media Education (Mediaobrazovanie), 2019, 59(2) popular? Are Russian artists, sculptors and literary people known to our educated masses? (...) and in parallel to these people I will bring you hundreds of all kinds of singers, acrobats and jesters, known even to little child" (Chekhov, 1886: 1145–1146). Another thing is that this trend exactly noticed by A.P. Chekhov has become dominant today. The "media persons" have separated from the mass audience not only scientists, but also figures of "old-fashioned" art. At the same time, opinions are increasingly expressed about the usefulness and correctness of spontaneous education in the sphere of (media) culture (Razlogov, 2005: 69). And the results of this "spontaneity" have long been felt not only by the professors of media and art universities, who are forced to make a set of applicants who know almost nothing about the history of art, classical works of art and literature, but also by ordinary school teachers who try to somehow draw the attention of "computer–advanced" and "familiar with the media" schoolchildren to the existence of culture. One of the most important tasks of media literacy education is to develop the ability of the audience to analyze media texts of different types and genres, including artistic ones. And here the works of outstanding scientists V.Y. Propp (1895–1970), Y.M. Lotman (1922–1993) and U. Eco (1932–2016), who have been studying the phenomenon of the text for many years, can provide invaluable assistance to the media educator. It is interesting that Y.M. Lotman had a chance to listen to lectures by V.Y. Propp and to talk to U. Eco many times. In addition to that, both Y. Lotman and U. Eco in their works repeatedly addressed to the research of V. Propp and highly appreciated them. There was also mutual respect between Y. Lotman and U. Eco, they understood the importance of each other's creativity. U. Eco wrote a preface to the English edition of works by Y. Lotman (Eco, 1996), and Y. Lotman – to the Russian edition of the famous Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose. In his article about Umberto Eco Yuri Lotman, in particular, wrote that when they met in Italy, he asked him when he would come to the Soviet Union. "Only after you have my novel published," he replied (Lotman, 1989: 481). The novel The Name of the Rose was published in Russian before the collapse of the Soviet Union, but, unfortunately, U. Eco came to Russia after the death of Yuri Lotman ... 2. Materials and methods The material for this article was the works of V. Propp, Y. Lotman and U. Eco in the context of semiotic approaches and media educational opportunities. Let's remind that the semiotic analysis of media texts is understood as the analysis of the language of signs and symbols; the given analysis is closely connected with the iconographic analysis. Semiotic Approach (Le decodage des medias) is based on semiotic theory of media, which is substantiated in the works of such media theorists of semiotic (structuralist) area as R. Barthes (Barthes, 1964), C. Metz (Metz, 1964), Y. Lotman (Lotman, 1992), U. Eco (Eco, 1960; 1976; 1998), etc. 3. Discussion and results Y.M. Lotman rightly emphasized that "the text appears before us not as a realization of the message in any one language, but as a complex device that stores a variety of codes, capable of transforming the received messages and generating new ones, as an information generator with features of intellectual personality. In connection with this, there is a change in the perception of the attitude of the consumer and the text. Instead of the formula "the consumer deciphers the text" it is possible to be more precise – "the consumer communicates with the text". He comes into contact with the text. The process of deciphering the text becomes extremely complicated and loses its one–time and final character, approaching the familiar acts of semiotic communication of a person with another autonomous personality" (Lotman, 1992: 132). Probably, we can agree that "all texts existing in the history of human culture – artistic and non–artistic – are divided into two groups: one of them seems to answer the question: "What is it? (or "How does it work?"), and the second is "How did it happen?" (Lotman, 1973). Lotman conventionally called the texts of the first group "plotless", and the second group "having a plot", precisely defining that "plotless texts affirm some order, regularity, and classification. (…). These texts are static in nature. If they describe movements, they are movements that are regularly and correctly repeated, always equal to themselves" (Loman, 1973). This point of view of Y.M. Lotman practically coincides with V.P. Demin's reflections that the known detective characters – Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Maigret – "figures rather conditional, calculatedly constructed for performance of the functions. The illusion of life arises as 244 Media Education (Mediaobrazovanie), 2019, 59(2) our response to the feeling of their successful construction. (…). The famous Aristotle's phrase about drama, which is impossible without intrigue and possible without characters, nowhere is it more appropriate than in relation to the detective. The detective story is possible without detailed descriptions, without landscape beauties and memorable characteristics, without a deeply worked out social background and half–tone nuances in the dialogues. But without inventively developed intrigue – no" (Demin, 1977: 238). It is clear that in the process of media literacy education of schoolchildren or students it is much easier (at least – at the first stage of training) to address to the media texts, which have stable structural codes, in other words, to the works, which have a pronounced fairytale, mythological basis, or the basis of the entertainment genre. Here, the best guides to the analysis of media texts can be found in works by V.Y. Propp, which clearly identify the main story situations and typology of characters in the fairy tale genre (Propp, 1998: 60–61). Our previous publications provided examples of the analysis of specific audiovisual media texts (Fedorov, 2008: 60–80; 2009: 4–13), based on the methodology of V.Y. Propp. The analysis of media texts and other mass genres, such as detective and thriller, is based on a similar principle (Bykov, 2010; Demin, 1977: 238; Eco, 1960: 52; Shklovsky, 1929: 142; Todorov, 1977: 49). And this type of analysis can also be successfully used in media pedagogy.